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“Striking the Roots of Crime: the Impact of the New Deal on Criminal Activity”

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“Striking the Roots of Crime: the Impact of the New Deal on Criminal Activity” “Striking the Roots of Crime: The Impact of the New Deal on Criminal Activity” Ryan S. Johnsona, Shawn Kantorb, and Price V. Fishbackc a Brigham Young University b University of California, Merced, and NBER c University of Arizona and NBER October 2004 PRELIMINARY DRAFT The authors wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of Lawrence Katz, Lars Lefgren, and Koleman Strumpf. Seminar participants at the 2002 NBER Summer Institute, 2003 ASSA meetings, and the University of Utah provided useful advice. Financial support has been provided by National Science Foundation Grants SBR-9708098, SES-0080324, and SES-0214395. We are solely responsible for the views expressed in the article. 2 “Striking the Roots of Crime: The Impact of the New Deal on Criminal Activity” [T]hrough a broad program of social welfare, we struck at the very roots of crime itself....Our citizens who have been out of work in the last six years have not needed to steal in order to keep from starving. Of course, when we instituted those [New Deal] activities we did not have in mind merely the narrow purpose of preventing crime. However, nobody who knows how demoralizing the effects of enforced idleness may be, will be inclined to doubt that crime prevention has been an important by-product of our effort to provide our needy unemployed citizens with the opportunity to earn by honest work at least the bare necessities of life. Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 17, 19391 I. Introduction During the 1930s, as the economy sunk into the depths of Depression with double-digit unemployment, there was widespread fear that the social and economic foundation of American society was crumbling. Faith in the capitalist market economy was shaken as millions of unemployed Americans sought desperate means to provide for their families’ subsistence. The Roosevelt administration, seeking to right the economic ship and aid those in distress, embarked on a series of grand experiments in 1933 that dramatically changed the interaction between the government and the economy, as well as the relationships between the federal and state and local governments. The centerpiece of the New Deal was the distribution of several billion dollars in funds to provide work relief jobs and direct relief to people throughout the country. The federal government for the first time in U.S. history took responsibility for aiding the unemployed and the poor. The relief that was provided during the New Deal went well beyond the scale seen before the 1930s and large amounts continued to be spent throughout the decade, even though the total number of unemployed (including relief workers) declined from the peak unemployment in 1933. As the economy slid toward the trough of the Depression in the early 1930s, the burden of providing relief rested on state and local governments and private charitable organizations. The federal government played a limited role in the early part of the Depression by providing loans through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation so that state and local governments could fund relief in the latter part 3 of 1932. In 114 cities for which detailed time-series data are available, per capita relief spending rose from $3.90 in 1930 to $18.70 in 1932 (constant 1967 dollars). It was Roosevelt’s New Deal, however, that revolutionized welfare spending both in the short term and the long term. The federal government poured resources (sometimes in partnership with state and local governments) into emergency work relief projects and direct relief during the First New Deal (1933-1935). After 1935 through the beginning of World War II, the federal government continued providing emergency work relief, while local governments took over the responsibility for the “unemployables.” Under the Social Security Act enacted in 1935, the Roosevelt administration established a federal/state/local partnership to provide public assistance to dependent children, the blind, and the aged that replaced the much smaller state and local programs that had existed prior to the New Deal. Federal involvement in relief efforts led to dramatic increases in spending, as per capita relief expenditures increased by about 160 percent between 1932 and 1933 and by 1940 they were almost three times the 1932 level. At the most basic level New Deal relief programs accomplished the fundamental objective of providing critically needed income to people who had no prospects for private employment. Yet given the significance of the New Deal in U.S. economic and political history, surprisingly little quantitative research has explored the economic consequences of New Deal spending.2 Using a new city-level panel data set that we have assembled, this paper examines Roosevelt’s belief, expressed in the opening quotation above, that the New Deal “struck at the very roots of crime.” The recent work of Raphael and Winter-Ebmer (2001) and Gould, Weinberg, and Mustard (2002) suggests that greater employment opportunities tend to mitigate criminal behavior in the modern era, so the massive federal intervention during the Great Depression naturally raises the question: To what extent did New Deal work relief and income-support programs diminish criminal behavior? The cross-sectional variation in the Depression’s economic shocks across the United States and in the government’s response provide a unique opportunity to empirically examine the effectiveness of social welfare programs in times of crisis. The paper not only contributes to our understanding of the New Deal from an historical perspective, but it also adds a feature to the economic analysis of crime that previous scholars have tended 4 to overlook or take as given. One of the central insights of the economic model of crime is that “Some persons become ‘criminals’ … not because their basic motivation differs from that of other persons, but because their benefits and costs differ” (Becker 1968, 176). Among the many factors that can influence the benefits and costs of criminal activity include legal employment opportunities, deterrence (police, prisons, and capital punishment), education, social policies, and social insurance. Despite the potential importance of welfare or social insurance programs in the theoretical model of crime, empirical analysis of their impact on crime is virtually absent from the economics literature.3 One worry in identifying the true causal effect of New Deal spending on crime is that the distribution of federal relief funds across time and cities was not exogenous, it was driven to some degree by economic distress in each city at each point in time. Since unemployment and crime are likely positively related and likely helped determine the distribution of relief, simple ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of the impact of relief spending on crime might be biased upward.4 Omitted variables may bias our results as well. For example, if relief spending “crowded out” city expenditures on activities that may have deterred crime, such as police, prosecution, or prisons, the crime rate would have been higher. Because we cannot control for all variables that may have been directly linked to crime and indirectly to relief, we adopt an instrumental variables (IV) approach. Given that New Deal spending across states was driven in part by measures of state size and federal land ownership, which were unlikely to be related to crime within a specific city, we are able to use these variables to create instruments in the IV estimation. Our results suggest that New Deal relief spending had a statistically significant impact in reducing crime rates in American cities. The IV estimates suggest that property crime was up to 30 percent lower than it otherwise would have been in the absence of relief spending during the Great Depression. Further, the IV estimates indicate that there was substantial bias in the OLS estimates that caused them to understate the importance of relief spending in reducing criminal activity. 5 II. Relief Spending During the Great Depression When the Great Depression struck, provision of welfare and social insurance was the primary responsibility of local governments, with some specific support from state programs. Families in dire circumstances might have turned to various sources for assistance. A number of cities provided shelter and food in almshouses, while some cities provided relatively small amounts of cash assistance and in- kind aid to the poor. Private charities often distributed various forms of aid, of which a significant portion was funded by local governments. Nearly all states had established mothers’ pensions for women who had lost their spouses and who had dependent children. Injured workers’ were covered under workers’ compensation laws established during the 1910s. An increasing number of states during the early 1930s instituted old-age pensions that provided limited cash benefits to the elderly and about half the states offered cash benefits to the blind. Some local governments tried to provide work for the unemployed through limited public works projects. The aid was administered by social workers, charities, and local officials who tried to assess the recipients’ needs and to some extent their “moral worthiness.” Prior to 1933 the federal government played almost no role in providing relief spending beyond some aid to veterans (see Skocpol 1992, ch. 2; Clark, Craig, and Wilson 2003). As the unemployment rate rose and income and tax revenues dropped between 1929 and 1933, state and local social welfare resources were quickly overwhelmed. During the fall of 1932 the Hoover administration provided loans through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to help some cities temporarily fund their relief budgets. Faced with national unemployment rates near 25 percent in 1933, the Roosevelt administration argued that the economy had become a national problem and thus the federal government should accept much greater responsibility for providing relief. In fact, by 1935 the federal government’s share of total relief spending had risen to 79 percent from 2 percent in 1932 (see Table 1).
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